Summary: A CONNECTED COMPONENT APPROACH TO THE
WATERSHED SEGMENTATION
ANDREAS BIENIEK and ALINA MOGA
Albert­Ludwigs­Universit¨at Freiburg
Lehrstuhl f¨ur Mustererkennung und Bildverarbeitung
Prof. Dr.­Ing. H. Burkhardt
Am Flughafen 17, D­79085 Freiburg, Germany
bieniek,moga@informatik.uni­freiburg.de
In Mathematical Morphology and its Applications to Image and Signal Processing,
volume 12 of Computational Imaging and Vision, pages 215­222. Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1998.
Abstract. The watershed transformation is a popular image segmentation algorithm for grey
scale images. In this paper, we present a definition of the watershed segmentation, based on sets of
neighboring pixels. The definition is consistent with the behavior of most implementations of the
watershed algorithm which do not construct watersheds lines, namely, to chose one arbitrary label
in the case of competing labels. Moreover, different distance metrics to approximate the geodesic
distance on plateaus can be incorporated into the definition. The relation to the traditional defi­
nition of the watershed segmentation is proven in the paper. The definition leads to a new type of
watershed algorithm which is closely related to the connected component algorithm. Our complex­
ity analysis shows that for practical cases, the algorithm has a linear complexity with the number of

Source: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Institut für Informatik,, Lehrstuhls für Mustererkennung und Bildverarbeitung

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences